What is your RSS strategy and how is it designed?
As I've been working on my DevCampus.com website, one of the things I am taking very seriously and spending time thinking about and researching is my RSS strategy (or "xml feeds" in general, I'd like to at least offer ATOM and maybe another format to please everyone).
Last night I started reading Developing Feeds with RSS and ATOM. I'm hoping this book will give me some insights into being on the other side of the fence. What I mean by "other side of the fence" is that while I've been blogging and consuming RSS/ATOM feeds for years now, I've never actually been responsible for creating the XML and producing my own feeds for anything yet. Since nobody can deny the popularity and demand for xml feeds, I'd be abandoning quite an audience if I didn't have a huge variety of feeds for people when DevCampus finally goes live. (Which I hope to be around the first of the year, btw) While I think it's a bit extreme for Scoble to say you should be fired if you don't have an RSS feed, I would agree that you look out of touch and out of date if you don't provide any. Gotta give the people what they want, right?
So anyway - I have high hopes and goals for RSS and the content on my site. I've listed them below. If you've ever been in charge of managing feeds for a website, blogging engine, whatever, feel free to chime in with your comments. I haven't really got far into this book yet so I'm looking for feed-managing wisdom from those willing to share it. "You shouldn't do that, it'll chew up far too much bandwidth" or "Oh that's easy, use this custom HttpHandler/HttpModule that's freely available at this website and it will take care of everything for you" - you know what I'm talking about. I imagine that feeds have been around long enough that some components to produce feeds are already out there. The notes below are as much for my brainstorming as they are for you to read so, keep that in mind I guess. I make no claims that these ideas are original or innovative.
DevCampus.com RSS Goals:
- Feeds for the most recent content - the last 5, 10, 25 or 50 pieces of content. Or maybe provide a URL that lets someone specify the number of items they'd like to see with a querystring value?
- Allow feeds to be dynamically requested by the use of certain URL's. For example, if a request like http://www.devcampus.com/Database/SQLServer/RSS (or /ATOM) came into my application, I'd like for my application to know this is a request for the latest content under the SQL Server course under the Database department. This would also allow me to automatically have feeds available every time I add another department or course of content. I could simply construct URL's based on the current department and course and stick that behind a little RSS or ATOM icon for each department and/or course home page.
- Request Tracking. I'd like to be able to keep track of when and how often requests for feeds are made. If I see 10 times as many requests being made for an ASP.NET 2.0 feed as I do for underwater basket weaving in VB.NET I can adjust what content I am writing for accordingly.
- Search Feeds. If someone searches for a specific keyword or phrase I'd like for them to be able to subscribe to the results as a feed. That way they don't have to keep coming back to my site and search to see if there is any content that they might be interested in.
- Custom feed URL's. For example, if I wanted to allow people to subscribe to newsletters via RSS, I'd like to be able to designate a specific URL (that I store in a database most likely) and have any URL in that list of URL's return the XML for a certain feed. Maybe I'd just associate a certain SQL query with that URL and provide a DataReader, DataSet, or DataTable to an RSS/ATOM generating component. Whatever works.
So - if you have any advice for me, I'm all ears.